In underground mines such as coal mines, conveyor belt systems often are utilized to remove the payload from the mine. The conveyor belt system of a typical coal mine may have as many as twenty belts, and each belt may be as long as 20,000 feet. In general, a belt is made from a rubber/fabric laminate and assembled by fastening together several belt sections end-to-end to form a continuous belt. The sections of the belt often are joined using metal clips laced together with steel cable. Namely, a row of clips is riveted to the end of one belt section and laced with a row of clips riveted to the end of another belt section. When installed, the two sets of clips together form a splice that joins the belt sections. Because the lengths of the sections that form a belt may vary, there is generally no uniformity to the spacing of splices.
As a splice wears, the clips can break, or be torn off the belt entirely, and the belt will pull itself apart. A broken belt is dangerous and can cause tons of material to be spilled, resulting in the shut down of production and requiring expensive clean up and repairs. A conservative estimate of failures is that each belt of a conveyor belt system in an underground mine fails once per year at a cost of on average $100,000 in lost revenue for the mine per failure. Assuming a belt system with twenty belts, this translates to a conservative estimate of a revenue loss of $2 million per year attributed to belt failures.